Das Reich (38 page)
At the time of a post-war trial, a Swiss writer was among those who considered the guilt of the Das Reich with most sympathy. In a long, carefully reasoned essay in
Monde Nouveau
in March 1953, Pierre Boisseau wrote:
It is impossible to say that Oradour was ‘useless’. Let us recall a few facts: on 6 June 1944 the Allied landed on the coast of Normandy. The 2nd SS Das Reich . . . received the order to move towards the enemy. They were delayed for four days on their march by incessant guerilla attack by a clandestine army, ubiquitous, impossible to engage, which caused explosions, hit outposts, cut communications . . . This division defended
itself by the only available means which would act quickly and effectively against the partisans: they took reprisals on such a scale as to convince everyone that any further operation would be to the disadvantage of those who attempted it. We know today that the terrifying example of Oradour added to that of Tulle prevented a surely successful attack that the
maquis
had planned on Limoges. We may assume that it also prevented many other
coups de main.. . . From two points of view one must choose one: either all violence is always part of the one vast unity – thus, there is no longer any question of war crimes. There is the crime of war which begins with the mere bearing of arms. All recourse to force is forbidden and punishable.
. . . Alternatively, two or several sovereign states employ violence against each other, and thus the ruins of Oradour are paid for by those of Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, by the labour of prisoners of war, by the political division of Germany, by the dismantled factories, by Occupation, by the children of France well-fed in the Black Forest, by a certain number of summary executions, by the last mopping-up operations of the war.
It might have been worthwhile to offer, in 1945, to all those gentlemen dressed in black who are presiding at the Oradour trial, a trip to Germany. They would have seen enough ruins, widows, orphans to assess sufficient reparations and return with dry eyes.
In short, could the bombers of Dresden justly try the destroyers of Oradour? But that is a dilemma of morality, not of history, which I am grateful to be able to leave the reader to resolve.
Most of the survivors of the Das Reich Division were in Hungary or Austria when the war ended, still fighting alongside such flotsam of the Third Reich as a unit of Dresden firefighters, who said that there was nothing useful left for them to do at home. Some of the SS reacted to news of the surrender like Ernst Krag’s wireless operator, who put one pistol bullet into his set and a second into his own head. Many others began an epic struggle to fight their way alone across Europe to their families – and out of the path of the Russians. Most were rounded up by the Allies and imprisoned. The French, naturally, claimed most survivors of the Das Reich, and several hundred were held in the prison ships at Bordeaux until the late forties or early fifties, awaiting trial or release. Otto Pohl, the young tank officer, found himself acting as assistant to the prison dentist, Captain Reichmann, late of the 95th Security Regiment in Tulle. Pohl’s father, the SS Inspector-General of Concentration Camps, was hanged at Nuremberg.
The war crimes trials of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, when they were finally held in 1951 and 1953, proved unsatisfactory to everyone concerned. Twenty-one NCOs and men of the 1st battalion of the Der Führer were indicted for their part in the massacre at Oradour. But Dickmann was dead, and Kahn could not be found. More senior officers such as Stadler were never tried.
Even more embarrassing from the French point of view, fourteen of the accused were Alsatian. A formidable protest movement was launched in Alsace, so lately and uneasily reunited with France. The Alsatians castigated the French Government
for permitting the trial of young men whom they considered almost as much the victims of Nazism as the dead of Oradour. Six of the fourteen had surrendered to the British in Normandy and told everything they knew about the massacre. Two had subsequently served with the French Army in Indochina.
On 12 February 1953, after weeks of horrifying evidence, the Military Tribunal at Bordeaux delivered its verdict. An Alsatian volunteer named Sergeant Boos was sentenced to death; nine other Alsatians received hard labour and four prison terms, none exceeding eight years. A German warrant officer, Lenz, was sentenced to death. One German was acquitted and the remaining five received prison terms of ten to twelve years. Forty-two other Germans were sentenced to death
in absentia
. France was racked by the storm that now followed – first from the relatives and survivors of Oradour, outraged by the leniency of the sentences, and second from the people of Alsace-Lorraine, convinced that their young men were being made scapegoats.
It was all too much for a French government struggling weakly to re-create national unity. All the Alsatians except Boos were amnestied. Both death sentences were commuted. Five of the seven Germans sentenced were repatriated at once, having already served more than their time while awaiting trial.
Only three people were available for trial for their part in the hangings at Tulle: Major Heinrich Wulf, the hangman Otto Hoff, and the interpreter Paulette Geissler. The defence – the only conceivable defence – was that the executions were an unfortunate but justifiable act of war. Private Schneid gave evidence of his own role, and felt that the court missed the point. He demanded of the official interpreter: ‘ “Ask the court if they knew what an order was in the German Army . . .” He told me that he could do nothing about it, that justice must take its course.’ Wulf was sentenced to ten years, Hoff to life, Geissler to three years. All were set free within a matter of months, in 1952.
If the leniency of the courts in 1951 and 1953 seems remarkable, it is necessary to remember the mood of the time. The world
had been sated with international justice and ritual retribution at Nuremberg. There was growing doubt and uncertainty about matters of absolute right and wrong, when the Russians had been allowed to sit in judgment on the Germans for barbarities which scarcely rivalled their own. There was a sense that somewhere, the search for the guilty must stop, that the time had come to look forward, rather than forever back. Above all, perhaps, there was the embarrassing knowledge that the most notorious figures had not come before the Tribunal. General Lammerding and Major Kowatsch were sentenced to death
in absentia
. Some SS men claimed that Kowatsch had died in Normandy. But it was well known that Lammerding was alive and well and building a prosperous engineering business in Düsseldorf. He sent a sworn statement to the Military Tribunal during the Oradour trial, before taking temporary refuge in Schleswig-Holstein. He then moved to the American zone until the hunt for his life had abated, and finally returned to Düsseldorf where he remained in prosperous security until his death in 1971. The British would take no action to extradite Lammerding or other wanted Nazis to France ‘unless there is incontestable evidence that the accused has committed murder’. In Lammerding’s case, there was thought to be doubt.
Most of the Das Reich officers who survived the war are today prosperous and vigorous men for their age: Weidinger, Stadler, Wulf, Stuckler, Krag and Kreutz – to name only the most senior. They keep in regular contact with each other, and argue with fierce passion that there is nothing in their wartime service for which they have cause to reproach themselves.
Most of the survivors of Resistance have also prospered. In the years after the war, a record as a prominent local
résistant
proved a passport to commercial and professional success for many Frenchmen (although it is interesting to notice how many Vichy officials were able to continue their careers uninterrupted by the Liberation). Over the years it has been forgotten who joined
Resistance in the dark days of 1942 and 1943, and who came hastily to the cause in June and July 1944.
But it should also be remembered that some Frenchmen still harbour a bitter private hatred for the
maquis
. One afternoon in June 1980, I sat in a pleasant house in the Dordogne hearing an elderly
vicomtesse
explode with passion about her memories of the depredations and murders allegedly committed by local
maquisards
. I heard of a priest in Brive, not many days later, who rendered great assistance to Resistance by bearing messages and concealing explosives. After the war, it is said that he was denied a bishopric because the church hierarchy so vividly remembered his activities during the Occupation.
After the Liberation, Prince Michel de Bourbon was summoned hastily to the
château
of one of his relations on the Loire, which the local Resistance were ransacking on the grounds that its owner had been a collaborator. De Bourbon, in uniform, produced his credentials, signed personally by De Gaulle. He demanded that they desist. Their leader tore up the letter, imprisoned him in a barn and promised to shoot him the next day. De Bourbon was fortunate to escape during the night.
Jacques Poirier was summoned equally urgently from Paris one day after the Liberation, by a prominent Limoges businessman who had provided Poirier with a safe house for many months, while posing as a collaborator. Now, George Guingouin’s men had promised to kill him. Poirier arrived in Limoges too late to prevent the blowing-up of the man’s garage business, but in time to save his life by some very tough talking to Guingouin and his cohorts.
There was a terrible national settling of scores in the months following the Liberation. M. Robert Aron suggests a total of more than 20,000 summary executions, most of them the work of former
résistants
. Simply to have served in the Resistance was not enough to provide safety in many regions – it was necessary to have been with the right faction.
Among the most prominent characters in this book, Jean-Jacques Chapou, who led the FTP attack on Tulle, was killed in action a few weeks later. Lieutenant Walter Schmald was captured by
résistants
in July and shot – some say more painfully killed. Soleil, Georges Guingouin and Robert Noireau are all alive, after quarrelling for years after 1945 with the French communist party. Violette Szabo was shot at Ravensbruck concentration camp early in 1945. Anastasie was killed in Indochina. Harry Peulevé survived Buchenwald.
Maurice Buckmaster became a successful businessman. George Hiller took up the diplomatic career that he had promised himself before the war, and served as a British ambassador before his death in 1973. Jacques Poirier and Peter Lake accepted the surrender of Brive in August 1944, while George Starr drove into Toulouse with his
maquisards
as the Germans abandoned it. Poirier became an oil company executive, retiring in 1980. He now lives with his beautiful wife in a delightful flat in Paris. André Malraux, of course, became De Gaulle’s Minister of Culture before his death. Baron Philippe de Gunzbourg still lives in enviable splendour, and has not lost his affection for Britain, while lamenting her decline. Peter Lake and the late George Starr became consular officials. In 1945, Starr had the satisfaction of entertaining to lunch his former commanding officer from the days when he was sergeant in charge of Phantom’s pigeons in 1940. His CO had finished the war as a major. Starr was a colonel. Several other members of the French Section transferred to the Secret Intelligence Service after the war. It would be tactless to say which.
René Jugie lives in a large house on the edge of Brive crammed with documents on Resistance and such sentimental keepsakes as a gammon grenade, detonator and Schmeisser sub-machine gun. Marius Guedin retired from the French Army as a general. The Verlhacs are dead, but the Brus are still in the enchanting village of St Céré, and Odette Bach and her family prosper in Souillac.
Prince Michel de Bourbon was parachuted into Indochina in 1945, handed over to the Vietminh by the Japanese, and held
prisoner until he escaped and walked for weeks through the jungle to Thailand. He now lives in a house at Versailles lavishly decorated with photographs of his relations among the royal families of Europe. Tommy Macpherson transferred immediately from France after the Liberation to further adventures in the Italian campaign. ‘Mac’ Austin lives on Hilton Head island, South Carolina. His wireless operator, Jack Berlin, is an ordained Baptist minister.
John Tonkin of the SAS travelled compulsively after the war, and took part in an expedition to Antarctica with Paddy Mayne, who later died of a heart attack. Tonkin is now a businessman in Australia. Sam Smith runs a café in Liverpool. John Fielding is an estate agent in Norwich. Peter Weaver lives in retirement on the south coast. Amédée Maingard built a large business in his native Mauritius before his death in 1980. Almost all those named above were decorated for their deeds in 1944.
The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane have been preserved as they lay on 10 June 1944, a French national monument. A sadly drab new village has been built near by, in which, astonishingly enough, Mme Rouffranche chose to spend the rest of her life.
In the town of Tulle, on 9 June each year a visitor will notice garlands hanging from many balconies and lamp posts. This is not a gesture to decorate the streets. Each one marks the spot upon which a citizen of Tulle was hanged by the Das Reich Division in 1944. Tulle has not forgotten, even though each year now a great army of German tourists passes through the Dordogne and Corrèze; as far as anyone can observe, without a hint of self-consciousness.
